Obama urged to double refugee intake

President Barack Obama is on track to exceed his goal of bringing 10,000 Syrian refugees to the United States this fiscal year, federal records show. But human rights activists, buoyed by a surge of interest in Syria thanks to the viral photo of a bloodied young boy, are hoping he will aim for a much higher target in the following 12 months.

Some are calling on Obama to admit at least 200,000 refugees from around the world, including tens of thousands of Syrians, through the U.S. refugee resettlement program and other routes. That’s effectively twice as many total refugees as the Obama administration has planned to accept in the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.

The advocates’ intensifying push comes as Syria’s civil war takes a dramatic turn for the worse, with the besieged city of Aleppo bearing much of the brunt of the recent fighting. The picture of Omran Daqneesh, the blood- and dust-covered little boy rescued after an airstrike, has reminded the world of the horror still unfolding in the Arab state.

Obama also is preparing to host a Sept. 20 international summit on the world’s migration crisis, a meeting in which he is expected to urge other countries to double their intake of refugees. The gathering will be held on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York City, just weeks before the end of a U.S. presidential campaign in which Republican nominee Donald Trump has made refugees an incendiary topic.

A kid identified as Omran Daqneesh after the air strike in Aleppo | Aleppo Media Centre

Refugee advocates say they understand the political sensitivities but argue that if the U.S. wants other countries to do more, especially for the millions of displaced Syrians, it has to lead by example.

“It’s not only the right thing to do, but it’s also in the U.S. national security interest,” said Eleanor Acer, senior director for refugee protection at Human Rights First.

White House spokesman Peter Boogaard would not detail the administration’s discussions but said it has “not set a specific target for any individual nationalities for fiscal year 2017.” Sources familiar with the discussions say that as the administration grapples with what to do about the refugee numbers it is keenly aware of the political tensions as the 2016 campaign heads into the final stretch.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has said she’d be open to taking more Syrian refugees, but Trump says he doesn’t want any on the grounds that terrorists could be hiding among them. A spate of recent attacks by Muslim migrants in Europe have only hardened suspicions within the GOP.

Obama aides, however, point out that refugees who reach the U.S. through its resettlement program get more rigorous security screening than any other type of immigrant — many wait for years for clearance. Earlier this month, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said the U.S. had recently added even more security checks to the process.

Trump has embraced the backlash against refugees in Europe, too — openly rooting for Brexit and comparing Clinton to Angela Merkel.

At the same time, the administration has increased staffing and taken other steps to speed up the resettlement process, which is one reason that, after a slow start, it may soon surpass the 10,000 goal for Syrians set by Obama. (More than 9,000 Syrian refugees have been allowed in the U.S. since Oct. 1 of last year.)

There are 4.8 million Syrian refugees registered with the United Nations, the vast majority of whom have settled in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. Hundreds of thousands have trekked to Europe, throwing several of those countries into crisis, undercutting the open-borders ethos of the European Union and spiking support for far-right parties.

Trump has embraced the backlash against refugees in Europe, too — openly rooting for the British exit from the EU and comparing Clinton to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor who has emerged as the symbol of the continent’s initially welcoming stance toward the Syrian influx.

But the international refugee crisis goes well beyond Syrians — there are a record 65 million people either displaced in their own countries or registered as refugees outside their countries, according to the United Nations. Many are in Africa or parts of Asia, where long-standing refugee camps often seem more like cities. The U.N.’s refugee agency on Friday said that the conflict in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has intervened with U.S. backing, had uprooted more than 3 million people.

As Europe dealt with the influx of migrants last year, Obama said the U.S. would increase the number of refugees it accepts from around the world from 70,000 to 85,000. The 85,000 cap included the goal of 10,000 Syrians. The Obama administration also said the U.S. would accept 100,000 total refugees in fiscal year 2017 — although activists are hoping he’ll take in twice that.

Shannon Scribner, a top official with Oxfam America, said her sense is that, despite pressure from activists, Obama is unlikely to go beyond 100,000 total refugees. One reason is that Congress controls the funding for the refugee resettlement program, and Republicans could kill any request for more money, she noted.

Obama likely will use the daylong summit in September, which will come on the heels of a similar U.N. summit, to push for more out-of-the-box efforts to help the world’s refugees. He is expected to announce new U.S. funding for the Middle Eastern countries hosting the majority of the displaced, and increased engagement with the private sector to seek solutions to the crisis. The administration has said it will ask other countries not just to accept more refugees through traditional resettlement programs (although many countries don’t have such programs) but also to open other avenues for refugees — through student or work visas, for example.

The stability of refugee-hosting countries such as Jordan and Lebanon is of special concern, posing a long-term national security threat to the U.S. And as the conflict in Syria rages on, many children are growing up with little or no access to schooling, raising the specter of the rise of a lost generation susceptible to extremism.

Oxfam America on Friday seized on the spike in interest in the photo of the young Syrian boy to ask people to sign on to an action letter to Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. The letter urges the pair to do more to bring the 5-year-old civil war in Syria to an end, while also helping those displaced by it.

More than half of U.S. governors announced within days of the Paris attacks that they didn’t want Syrian refugees in their states.

“With nearly 5 million Syrian refugees, the U.S. can and should be resettling many more than this 10,000,” the letter states. “When you make your resettlement determination in September, we urge you to ensure that resources are committed and that the pace of resettlement is significant stepped up.”

The effect of a single photo can be fleeting. One reason the Obama administration decided to increase its intake of Syrian refugees this current fiscal year is because of the outrage that ensued last September over another heartbreaking viral photo, that of a 3-year-old Syrian boy whose body had washed up on a beach in Turkey.

But the Islamic State-linked attack that killed 130 people in Paris in November, as well as the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, in December gave many Republicans, and some Democrats, pause — with many saying they were concerned that terrorists were taking advantage of migration flows to infiltrate the West.

“This could be one of the great Trojan horses,” Trump said of the refugee program. He has also accused Clinton of wanting to spend “hundreds of billions of dollars to settle Middle Eastern refugees in the United States” — a claim that independent fact checkers have debunked — and dinged her repeatedly for calling last September for the U.S. to admit 65,000 properly screened Syrian refugees, a 550 percent increase over Obama’s figure.

More than half of U.S. governors, most of them Republicans, announced within days of the Nov. 13 Paris attacks that they didn’t want Syrian refugees in their states, shocking activists used to solid bipartisan support. The governors’ attempts to block refugees have been spurned by the courts, but the partisan bile led some aid groups to curb efforts back then to push for an expanded U.S. resettlement program.

At the same time, the debate had another effect: Many Americans who had never heard of the refugee program suddenly grew interested. Faith-based organizations, including evangelical Christian groups who have long been major players in the refugee world, denounced Republican recalcitrance and stepped up their aid work.

“The politics, yes, we are at a sensitive time, but from our end we just keep getting calls from people who want to help. We have more volunteers and more donations than ever,” said Melanie Nezer, chairwoman of Refugee Council USA, a coalition of groups that assist refugees.

The activists credit the administration for forging ahead with the resettlement of Syrian refugees despite the tremendous political pressure; Obama has in fact made some of the most impassioned comments of his presidency about refugees — even accusing Republicans of being “scared of widows and orphans.”

The September summit gives refugee advocates another chance to boost momentum for their cause. Some groups are hoping in particular to rebuild trust in the refugee program among Republicans, with outreach efforts on Capitol Hill.

At the same time, the summit could re-ignite the partisan debate, especially on the presidential campaign trail.

During a speech on national security earlier this week, Trump again claimed the U.S. isn’t really vetting Syrian refugees, and he blasted Clinton for wanting to let in more, saying it would lead to more crime.

“We have enough problems in our country. We don’t need another one,” he said.